Tonight my local vicar rang and asked me to preach on Ash Wednesday. He said I could change the gospel if it didn't fit what I wanted to preach about as a 'way in' to the Lent Course or I cuold use the set reading. This year we are going to be using Life Calling from Church House publishing, an exploration of vocation.
I was reluctant to change the gospel reading if everything else is bog stnadard lectionary - it wouldn't make a whole heap of sense. Having checked the two offerings, I opted for John 8 (the woman 'caught in the very act of adultery') and am contemplating possibly doing a sermon in two parts - part narrative/enactment from her perspective, and part traditional and in relationship to calling. After all this woman was called to account by the powers that be and then called on to a new way of living by Jesus. Whether I'll quite have the timerity to do an 'enacted' first half, I'm not sure, though if it worked it could be very powerful.
I just went back and read what the Bible actually says - always a good idea - and realised how I've spent a lifetime locating this incident in the wrong setting. So, I suspect, have many people I know.
In my mind's eye, this event takes place in open countryside where the audience is essentially the men dragging this woman before Jesus. (Sound effect meaning you got that wrong). What the gospel says is Jesus went to the Mount of Olive then to the Temple where he sat down to teach people. Enter angry mob with terrified woman. A very different scenario.
I then found myself imagining the Ash Wednesday service or the upcoming Lent studies... there we all are in church, just getting to a really holy bit when a few highly respected church officials barge in dragging with them some poor unfortunate caught in the act of some contemporary moral crime (adultery or otherwise). How would we react? How would I react if I was leading the service or leading the study?
Of course, the Temple environs were nothing like a twenty-first century church, and the general impact of a few more folk, albeit angry ones, arriving would have been very different. But it did make me think. Some folk had gathered to listen to Jesus, maybe had come specially and were really eager to hear what he had to say. How did they feel about what happened? What impact did the events have on their lives?
Having realised this, I can't unrealise it, can't go back to my rural image, so I have to begin again to think through this story. I'd still like to try the sermon in two parts, because actually I now think that it is quite important to note that this event occurred on officially holy territory - and ask myself, and others, what that has to say about our conduct when we are in our holy huddles.
Thanks God for stirring me out of complacency - yet again!